Automated Repair of Internationalization Presentation Failures in Web Pages Using Style Similarity Clustering and Search-Based Techniques

Internationalization enables companies to reach a global audience by adapting their websites to locale specific language and content. However, such translations can often introduce Internationalization Presentation Failures (IPFs) — distortions in the intended appearance of a website. It is challenging for developers to design websites that can inherently adapt to varying lengths of text from different languages. Debugging and repairing IPFs is complicated by the large number of HTML elements and CSS properties that define a web page’s appearance. Tool support is also limited as existing techniques can only detect IPFs, with the repair remaining a labor intensive manual task. To address this problem, we propose a search-based technique for automatically repairing IPFs in web applications. Our empirical evaluation showed that our approach was able to successfully resolve 98% of the reported IPFs for 23 real-world web pages. In a user study, participants rated the visual quality of our fixes significantly higher than the unfixed versions.